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Sugary drinks fuel obesity epidemic

This July 2, 2009 image shows an overweight male. Childhood obesity is now the United States' worst health crisis, experts said July 28, 2009, urging parents to ban television in kids' rooms and lawmakers to slap a tax on sugar-laden sodas.(KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)

September is just around the corner and families are getting ready to go back to school. For parents, this often entails heading to the grocery store to stock up on lunch-box staples. On these shopping trips, parents are confronted with literally thousands of choices. One of the choices they must make is what sort of drinks to buy for their kids’ lunch.

Naturally, parents want to give their children something special for those first days of a new school year. This often leads them to opt for a soda or “real fruit drink,” a choice often justified with the words “everything in moderation.” The trouble is that there is nothing moderate about a sugary drink that contains 10 teaspoons of sugar. It’s even worse to use this liquid candy to wash down the sweet dessert treat also tucked in the bag.

While parents are aware that sugar is “bad” for their children, makers of sugar-sweetened beverages spend hundreds of millions in marketing dollars every year to make sure their feel-good slogans override any unease consumers may have.

Let’s take a minute and look at what happens in the body when someone consumes 10 teaspoons of sugar in liquid format, cut with just enough phosphoric acid to keep it from tasting overly sweet. Within 10 minutes of consuming a sugar-sweetened beverage, the body mobilizes to deal with the assault. The pancreas pumps out insulin to break down the onslaught of sugar. The insulin kick-starts the liver which then frantically starts turning sugar into fat. These fats are the same ones that are linked with the development of heart disease.

Once the pancreas and liver have got the sugar mopped up, a “sugar crash” often follows. The body, which has been running on overdrive, has removed so much sugar from the body so quickly that the drinker is left with low blood sugar. As a result they may feel left feeling exhausted, irritable, light-headed and hungry. Not exactly the best way to start the afternoon class!

As dramatic as the immediate impact of consuming a sugar-sweetened beverage is, the effect of long-term consumption is worse – and severely underestimated. Even in individuals of normal weight, sugary drinks have been linked with the development of high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. The link with unhealthy weights is even stronger.

Children who drink sugary drinks on a daily basis have a 60 per cent higher risk of becoming overweight or obese than do non-consumers. Unfortunately, the majority of overweight children become overweight teen-agers who grow up to become over-weight adults.

If current trends continue, by 2040 up to 70 per cent of Canadian adults aged 40 will either be overweight or obese. The longer the time a person carries an unhealthy weight, the greater the risk of illness.

Being overweight significantly increases the likelihood of chronic diseases such as heart disease, stroke, arthritis, cancer and diabetes. The consequences are a diminished quality of life and an enormous burden for our provincial health care system that already pays some $450 million for obesity-related illnesses annually.

But that won’t happen to my child, most parents think. In fact, a recent article in The Vancouver Sun highlighted a study revealing that only 16 per cent of B.C. parents consider their children as either overweight or obese when statistically closer to one in three youth have an unhealthy weight. In fact, the number of obese children in Canada has more than doubled in the last 25 years.

So what can be done? For starters, families need to re-evaluate their choices as they send their kids back to school. By making an informed choice about the drink in their child’s lunch box, parents are making a powerful contribution to their child’s long-term health.

Sugary drinks are inexpensive, tasty and heavily marketed to children and youth. They are not a good choice for hydration however. Water is the best beverage to quench thirst.

We educate our children and youth to prepare them for a productive and healthy future. But education begins at home and by making wise lunch bag selections, parents help their children learn about healthy beverage choices for the school day and for life.